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In the media

Politics, lawsuits and baseball

You might think that there's nothing inherently political about writing an encyclopedia. You'd be wrong as several of this month's stories in the media show. There are regimes, political parties – or the people that these parties represent – businesses, and just ordinary people who would like to control the information that Wikipedians intend to be available to every single person on the planet. This month's stories range from the international and national to U.S. state and local politics.

Wikipedia v. China, Turkey, and the NSA

  • China blocks all language versions of Wikipedia:
    • The Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) first reported that all language versions of Wikipedia were being blocked on May 4, 2019. The Chinese-language version has been blocked since 2015, but blocking all versions is a major escalation.
    • The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) confirmed the block to the BBC on May 14, saying that the block began in April. The WMF followed up three days later on its blog, stating that the blocking impacts "more than 1.3 billion readers, students, professionals, researchers, and more who can no longer access this resource or share their knowledge and achievements with the world. We have not received notice or any indication as to why this current block is occurring and why now."
    • Steven Harrison in Slate tells us "Why China Blocked Wikipedia in All Languages Hint: There’s a big anniversary coming up." The 30th anniversary of the violent end of the Tiananmen Square protests will be marked on June 4. Harrison notes a long history of censoring encyclopedias, starting with religious opposition to Denis Diderot's 18th-century Encyclopédie and the French government's 1752 order to stop its distribution. Previous censorship of Wikipedia by China, Turkey, Iran and Venezuela was also noted. One reason for China blocking all language versions, according to Harrison, is that online translation tools have improved, making it easier for Chinese-speakers to comprehend other language versions.
  • WMF takes Turkey to the European Court of Human Rights:
    • The Wikimedia Foundation announced it is petitioning the ECHR to stop Turkey from blocking Wikipedia. (See our republication of the Wikimedia blog here). Turkey began blocking the Turkish-language version of Wikipedia in April 2017. The WMF has previously challenged the block through discussion with the Turkish authorities, legal action in Turkish courts, and a publicity campaign aimed at the general public. Both the Financial Times and the BBC have reported the story, following the facts in the WMF blog and expressing doubt that Turkey would comply with any ruling against it.
  • Wikipedia and the NSA case

State and local politics

Looks like a duck
  • City & State New York reports that the Wikipedia article on New York State Assemblyman Michael Blake was edited by a paid staffer during Blake's campaign for the office of New York City Public Advocate. The staffer, identified by City & State as the campaign's co-director of communications (hint: he looks like a duck) received $3,000 for his campaign work as a "content creator". The campaign reportedly confirmed the identification and responded in part "the campaign member who made the edits complied with their understanding of the Wikipedia editing rules and provided the expected level of transparency in updating the Assemblyman’s page." Apparently Wikipedians need to inform political campaigns that paid promotional editing is against our rules. Assemblyman Blake did not win the Public Advocate office but is now running for a seat in the U.S. Congress.
  • Lancaster Online reports that the Wikipedia article on Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro was edited by one of his staff who is paid $65,526 annually by taxpayers. Paid staff for Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa and Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman were also reported to have edited articles on their bosses.

Do you have ideas on how Wikipedians can deal with the political pressures shown above? We'd love to see those ideas in the comments section below.

In brief

  • Wikipedia has a Google Translate problem in The Verge describes the difficulties of using Wikipedia's translation software. One of the interesting aspects of this article is that it is written by a Wikipedia administrator. It's good that the media now has another reporter who really knows how Wikipedia works.
Do we still need a Collections Online?
(from Wikimedia Commons)

Gobbler of the month

Gobbler of the month
awarded to
Detroit Tigers
May 2019

In a May 3 tweet starting "Someone update his Wikipedia page" the Detroit Tigers said that their relief pitcher Shane Greene "owned the 9th (inning)" – a nonsense claim that only a PR hack could think was funny. Six minutes later the vandalism appeared on the page, as duly reported by another Tigers' tweet and by Detroit Sports Nation. The vandalism was soon removed. Perhaps the sports blog can be excused for reporting irrelevant vandalism as if it were news. Otherwise, they might need to work hard enough to report a real story. The Detroit Tigers, however, cannot be so easily excused. As a legitimate business that represents the city of Detroit to baseball fans throughout the world, they should not be trying to get cheap publicity by encouraging vandalism on Wikipedia.

There are legitimate ways that sports teams can increase their visibility on Wikipedia. For example, where they own the copyrights, they could donate photos of current players or of historical plays and players to improve the quality of our coverage of their teams. Or they might even post on their own website biographies of new players. If they really wanted to make it easy for Wikipedia editors to cover the team. They could even state on each of those pages "Material on this page is licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0". The quality of sports team coverage on Wikipedia can be increased by making it easy for our editors to cover the team. But the quality will never be increased by encouraging vandalism.

The Tigers have not responded to an e-mail requesting clarification or comment.



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As a baseball fan, albeit of the proper team, I can't get too worked up about it. First off we all know who really owned the 9th, and there are many much more ill-intentioned edits I'd worry about before standard fanboyism. That said, good people nipped that at the bud so said Yankee washout didn't get too much credit! The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 03:13, 1 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

When the fanboys do it - at least half a dozen times a month it seems - I can say to myself "ordinary Wikipedia vandalism" - and forget about it. When it looks like sport writers are doing it themselves, because they can't bother coming up with a good story without vandalizing Wikipedia - I say someday I'll catch one of these bozos, but getting proof is pretty difficult. When the team itself tweets, in effect, "go vandalize Wikipedia" I say "that's why we have the 'Gobbler of the month'!" Somebody needs to call out the turkeys. Smallbones(smalltalk) 19:53, 2 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

















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